Peak woke – like peak oil – is a moment always apparently on the horizon but never actually reached. The happy reality of our material world is that oil is still the new oil – we are discovering new sources of hydrocarbons every day and it will be many decades before the last well runs dry. Less happily, woke is still rampant, flowing through the boardrooms just as the Suez Canal was said to lap through Lady Eden’s own drawing room.

It is hard not to come to the conclusion that Manifold has been removed for daring to articulate the importance of concepts such as profit, performance and professionalism

It is hard not to come to the conclusion that Manifold has been removed for daring to articulate the importance of concepts such as profit, performance and professionalism

The leaders of our major institutions daily exhibit a stubborn attachment to politically correct over-sensitivity, diversity pathology, equity mania and the inclusion obsession. And now this persistence of woke has been made graphically apparent this month in the travails of what was, once, our leading oil company. BP (once fancifully rebranded as ‘Beyond Petroleum’) has been consumed by the falling-out between the alpha male chairman, Albert Manifold (Irish father of three and former prop forward) and the achingly modern chief executive, Meg O’Neill (an American lesbian with one daughter, and netball fan). In a number of ways, it is a corporatist parable for our times.

Manifold was ousted after ‘serious concerns’ about him were raised to the BP board. The list of Albert Manifold’s allegedly manifold micro-aggressions is (so far at least) a bit thin on real substance. BP declared that it was officially due to ‘governance standards, oversight and conduct’. Anonymous quotes after the event said he was ‘shouty’ and somewhat controlling of information (some of which might have been to do with potential corporate activity, conducted on his personal phone). He was also reportedly quite keen to stay in a five-star hotel. (How many FTSE Chairmen stay in three or four-star hotels?) In the most recent salvos, an unspecified allegation of ‘bullying’ has been made, and legal action is expected. Reading between the lines, it is hard not to come to the conclusion that he has been removed for daring to articulate the importance of concepts such as profit, performance and professionalism.

The real........

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